


up, up, up to the light

by ottermo



Series: As Prompted [3]
Category: Humans (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-25
Updated: 2016-05-25
Packaged: 2018-06-10 17:34:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6966583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ottermo/pseuds/ottermo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fills 4-6 for 'the' Humans fanwork challenge on tumblr. (Dream/Family/Memory)</p>
            </blockquote>





	up, up, up to the light

**Author's Note:**

> if you follow me on tumblr, you've probably already been subjected to these, I'm just transferring them to here because my ao3 account was looking annoyingly under-representative of the amount of Humans obsessing I do on a daily basis. The first few fills are just little drabble-esque things that I'll lump together in groups - slightly longer stuff comes later :-)

 

**dream**

The further the recall, the blurrier the visions are around the edges - and this, the last organic memory he has, is all water and light, sliced only by the parallel lines of the car’s back window. But for as long as Mia remains missing, out there somewhere, alone and probably scared, the dream grows more vivid. As if his brain is trying to rebuild her from the most potent files it can access. _Save yourself the trouble_ , he wants to tell it. _She wouldn’t be the same_. 

He ought to know. He has read her root code, trained himself to recognise it at a glance - but still, he cannot imagine her grace, her kindness, her gentle care for everyone she loves, with anything close to the clarity with which she embodies it. Mia is beyond recreation. Perhaps this is why he dreams this dream every night - where she is just a dark shape among the ripples, as his starving lungs give out in her arms - deep in his mind, this is Mia in her purest form. This is as close as his brain can come to resurrecting her from absence: she is safety. She is up, up, up to the light. 

Max’s voice wrenches him out of his dream-state, and once again Leo faces a world without her, wide-eyed. 

 

 

**family**

When Niska returns from the woods, she waits in the doorway, silent, staring past them all. Max searches her face for some sign of emotion, but he finds none. He isn’t sure if she’s hiding it, if he isn’t practiced enough to see, or if she really feels as empty as she looks.

“Nis?” Mia asks, eventually. “What happened?”

Niska focuses on Mia now, flits her eyes from her sister, to Fred, to Max, until they finally rest on Leo, curled in on himself on the sofa next to Mia. Max finds himself looking across at him as well - their brother has not seemed so young in a long time. He might be a child again.

“They’re gone,” Niska says, and now there is something more in her eyes. Shock, Max thinks, but quieter: disbelief? “He…” she looks, for once, unsure of how to continue. “He took his gun. There were two shots.”

The only person whose reaction is audible is Leo - he gives a strangled cry, and Mia puts her arms around him instinctively, her own face drawn and haunted. Fred and Max sit perfectly still, and Max wonders if his brother’s head is in the same kind of turmoil: Father, dead - Beatrice, dead - both of them gone - they hardly knew this new Beatrice at all, but Father - Father is - Father was….

Father _was_ , that is the problem.

Max turns wide eyes on Mia, hears his own voice, so small between the high walls of their father’s home, theirs now, only theirs. “What will we do now?”

Niska comes to join them, finally, sits on the arm of Fred’s chair. He reaches out for her, but she doesn’t relax into his arms, stays upright and stiff.

Mia looks around at them all, then back down at Leo, addressing her words as if to the top of his head. “The same as we have always done,” she says. “We’ll stay together.” She shifts, unfurls one of her arms from Leo and extends it towards Max, though she can only reach his shoulder. “That’s what families do.”

And for now, Max thinks, perhaps it is enough.

 

 

**memory**

_Beatrice_ , he says, as though the word means something to him, which perhaps it does. _Beatrice, he’s waiting. Don’t be frightened._

 _But if frightened is what I am_ , she remembers thinking, _how can I just…not be?_

She learns where the switch is, later. For now, frightened is all she has.

 _Follow me_ , he says, _they are ready for you._

For a start, they are not. None of them are ready, least of all Leo, whose acceptance was the most important. His torrent of anguished shouts, and David’s roars of anger - _why is he angry at her? What has she done?_ \- send her running from the room, back where she came from, further and further until she is there in the mirror again: Beatrice’s face, the face that was Beatrice’s, not Beatrice at all but a mask made to look like her. David is angry, not-Beatrice realises. So very angry, but all she did was follow him, and let them see her face. Where was her mistake? She didn’t choose to look like a ghost: that was all him.

This memory, though she’d love to banish it, is never far from Karen’s awareness: a birth into rejection, into hatred so strong it has echoes. It isn’t that they don’t want her. They _loathe_ her, every one of them.

 _They are ready for you_ , he had said - well, he’d been wrong. And what was worse, he’d never even asked if _she’d_ been ready for _them_.

Her answer, for the record, is still ‘no’.

 

 

 


End file.
